Catch a Falling Star: The Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight

One of the most spectacular celestial events of the year is lighting up our skies — and Space Park Leicester is helping track it

Blog author: Josh Barker

This week sees one of the highlights of the astronomy calendar. The peak of the Perseid meteor shower is today meaning one of the best opportunities in the year to spot a shooting star. The fleeting astronomical events are always memorable to those that see them. A bright flash of light as a speck of cosmic dust glows as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Perseids occur every august and is one of the most active meteor showers in the calendar with over 100 meteors an hour sometimes spotted on the most active nights. The peak (12th August) of the shower is the time we expect to see the most but for the next week or so you have a great opportunity to spot some meteors in the night sky. It’s very simple to do, head out somewhere nice and dark with a clear sky, look upwards and be patient. This meteor shower is named after the constellation of Perseus as that’s the constellation the meteors appear to come from but they can be spotted across the whole sky.

Here at Space Park Leicester, we are part of the UK Fireball network. This is a nation-wide network of cameras constantly watching the sky to monitor and record as many meteors as possible. A small camera on our roof constantly watches the sky to catch a glimpse. When it spots a meteor, it snaps some pictures and sends the details to a world-wide database so that scientists can analyse the data, track where the meteorites may have fallen and understand more about their effects on the Earth.

If you miss seeing a meteor yourself, the data our camera gathers is combined with the rest of the networks on a public access website: Fripon website: https://fireball.fripon.org/list_single.php. Here you can track all the meteors spotted by similar cameras across the world. To see ones specifically spotted by the Space Park Leicester camera you can use the Station Code: ENEM01 to filter for our images and contributions.

Happy Stargazing!

For more information, why not check out this blog from our friends at the National Space Centre Blog: https://www.spacecentre.co.uk/news/space-now-blog/perseid-meteor-shower-2025/

Main image: Perseid meteor images captured by the Space Park Leicester Fireball camera